This presentation was shared a couple of days ago. It’s a bit long in the end and the predictions on how what will happen in the future per se are probably nothing you haven’t thought about. Bring in the gaming aspect he might have point though. Personally, I think the style of the presentation is one to absorb. While the school often says you shouldn’t look at your slides, I think the presenters pacing and sense of humor makes for a really interesting session.
And the Facebook formulas are quite interesting, too – Farmville is bigger than Twitter, that’s how big Facebook is!

In the past weeks I have become more and more alienated with Facebook, predominantly due to the piss-poor “friends”-management settings the new release has. Piss-poor. There is still a rant coming on that.

The unquestioned fact is that since leaving Harvard for Silicon Valley nearly six years ago, Mark has led Facebook’s growth from a college website to a global service playing an important role in the lives of over 400 million people.

Really? Facebook plays an important role in our lives? I’d argue that the people the software connects play an important role, not the darn software. For all I care I’d be using the phone to keep contact which would probably better resemble the actual number of friends, not this inflated thing which came to be because everybody who you said ‘hi’ to has nothing better to do than become your friend.

Facebook plays absolutely no important role in my live. My family does. Close friends do. Get a grip, people.

So last Friday I left for Jerusalem, intending to skip email and just be sending signals, not following Techcrunch, RSS etc. So I was just doing social media stuff “privately” for the lack of a better word. No professional afterthoughts. Here is what I noticed:

I used Twitter only to say “hi I am there” and the occasional update for my boss who is not on the plattform I mainly used: Facebook. It wasn’t so much about being online because I always am, but I was really sharing selected things with my Facebook friends, enjoying the feedback. Highly interactive and since with the current user growth, more and more of my friends from all sides of live are on Facebook, very rewarding, in a sense. Heck, I even started to organize my friends into groups and checking some way more often than the “usual” web suspects. (that part was done prior to the vacation, not during)

So, disconnecting from web crowd lead to re-connecting with old friends, using the tools of the prior. It feels good to actually JUST use the stuff and experience it first hand instead of pontificating the next big thing and stick-and-stacking the label from one service to the next. By doing that, got the sense (to go back to pontificating) that Twitter and Facebook will get along just fine for a long time. One service for the real-time news, the other for the actual representation of the social graph.